Frequently Asked Questions
How to identify your best performing keywords with PPC Ninja
The Keywords sub-menu in the left pane is a giant list of all your keywords across all campaigns and ad groups. This list is updated daily and contains vital statistics of every keyword. Select an appropriate time range for analysis and sort by ACoS, Sales and CPC to find your best performing keywords.
One of the ways this view is helpful, is that it cuts across all campaigns and provides you a single view. So for example you want to see how your “usb cable” keyword is doing across all your different campaigns for cables, you can view and compare them all here.
Additionally, enclosing the keyword you are analyzing, within double quotes will search for that terms as a stand-alone keyword.
How to discover new keywords from buyer search terms
The long way to discover good keywords is to download your search term reports frequently and piece all the csv files together. This is not only time consuming but also requires advanced Excel skills that you or your VAs might not have. The easy way is to visit the Search Terms view on the left nav bar in PPC Ninja, where we provide you a repository of all your buyer search terms over time, and by campaign. Sorting this view by sales descending and filtering on an ACOS values can help you identify good search terms that are candidates for keywords to add to manual campaigns.
How to identify negative keywords from buyer search terms
As explained in the previous tip, you no longer need to download Search Term reports to extract buyer search data. PPC Ninja’s Search Term reports do all the heavy lifting for you. Filter by ACOS greater than an unacceptable value such as 70%. All the buyer search terms that meet this criteria will be selected. Now go through this list to see if there is a pattern of bad clicks with poor sales conversions, or if the buyer search term leading to clicks are simply irrelevant to that keyword or auto-campaign. These are candidates for negative keywords. Make a note of these on the side, or download the list using the Export button and complete this activity in a spreadsheet app.
How to optimize bids with PPC Ninja
PPC Ninja provides weekly bid change recommendations, with easy accept / reject buttons that save you time. We analyze your data over a 2 week look-back window, so that we have enough data to provide meaningful adjustment recommendations. Each recommendation comes with a ‘Description’ and ‘Reason’ field to help you make the decision of whether to accept or reject. In addition, you can also access all the vital statistics about that keyword, such as the number of clicks it received, the number of impressions it had, the sales, ACoS, Cost Per Click values. It’s also easy to override the bid change value to one of your choice. Simply click on Override in the New Bid column.
All your bid changes made within PPC Ninja or elsewhere (Such as another tool, Amazon Campaign Manager etc) get automatically recorded in the Bid Change History section accessible from the left nav bar.
How to track and analyze your PPC metrics
The PPC Ninja dashboard provides dynamic charting and an overview of your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your Sponsored Products Ads. Select the appropriate market, select a date range for analysis and analyze your data visually.
Here is an explanation of each metric and how to use it for analysis.
ACoS All SKU
Sales of other SKUs that Amazon attributes to an ad are included in this calculation of ACoS. This metric is particularly useful to business owners who want to know the cost and impact of your ad generated sales, not just for the advertised SKU but also other products that might be similar or variations.
ACOS Same SKU
This is simply a measure of the spend over sales for the advertised SKUs. This is a particularly important metric for PPC Managers who should be closely watching the effectiveness of ads effectiveness for the advertised SKU, in terms of keyword relevancy and listing effectiveness, not just the overall impact on all-SKU sales.
Conversion Rate
Amazon’s typical conversion rate is about 10%. If you are above this, keep up the good work. If below, you need to work listing optimization, which includes ensuring that keywords that well converting PPC terms are included on the listing in exact phrase order in one of the indexed fields. At this point we have tested the following fields to be fully indexed: Title, Bullets, Search Terms, Subject Matter and Product Description (even if you have EBC content)
Conversions (Units)
This is the number of units you sold within the selected time period
CTR (Click Through Rate)
CTR is a ratio of the number of clicks to the number of impressions. The average CTR on Amazon is .5%. This means that for every 1000 people who saw your ad, 5 of them clicked. If your CTR is above this value that’s great, if it’s below this value, try to improve the quality of your offer, which includes your Main Image, Title. Price and Review Rating as these are the things that buyers judge your ad by, before they click on it. CTR is one of those metrics that Amazon uses to decide how relevant your keyword is. For example, if your keyword is “potato chips” but your product is “potato slicer” you may not get many clicks and Amazon will factor your low CTR into the keyword’s relevancy score.
Impressions
Impressions represent the number of times your ads were shown to shoppers. This number tends to be pretty large given that Amazon has millions of buyers and ads server to them 24 hours a day on different devices. On mobile devices, an impression is counted even if buyers scroll through quickly. A catchy main image that follows Amazon’s image guidelines is important.
Sales
The $ value of the sales within the selected time period
Spend
The $ value of the spend within the selected time period
Sales Trends
Located in the left pane, this is a unique view of PPC sales by date and ASIN that you won’t find anywhere on Amazon. We consolidate your PPC sales data per product, even if that product is advertised in multiple campaigns.
A good way to analyze performance over time is to pick a date range that you want to analyze and pick an appropriate aggregation, such as daily, weekly, or monthly
How frequently does PPC Ninja data sync with Amazon
As soon as you sign-up for a PPC Ninja account, our engine begins a 2-way sync with Amazon data through APIs. Any changes you make on PPC Ninja are pushed to Amazon within a few minutes. Any structural changes you make to keywords, adgroups, campaigns, bidding strategies etc. on Amazon are reflected in PPC Ninja every 6 hours.
PPC data is polled daily and includes values such as impressions, clicks and sales. Bid recommendations are made weekly based on observing data over a 2-week look back window upto a few days before the current date. This is to accomodate for data reporting delays on Amazon’s end.
Does PPC Ninja support the new bidding strategies and placement bid modifiers?
The short answer is yes! For Sponsored Product ads, you can now make adjustments to Bidding Strategies, that include one of “Dynamic-Down Only”, “Dynamic -Up/Down” and “Fixed Bids”. These can also be paired with 2 modifiers for “Top of Search” and “Product Pages”. You can easily change the values of these modifiers from the Campaigns view.
As to which bidding strategy is the most suitable for your campaigns, refer to
this article by our CEO.
How to perform bulk operations with PPC Ninja
PPC Ninja is all about bulk operations to help you save time. Adjust multiple bids and budgets that meet certain criteria by simply filtering, selecting and adjust in bulk. For example, select all keywords that have an ACoS > 70% by typing 70 in the ACoS column. Then select the relevant items you want to perform a bulk operation with, by clicking on the selection checkbox. Next, chose the bulk action you want to perform.
You can also refer to
this article on Bulk Operations with Amazon Seller Central.
How to pick the best placement for your Sponsored Product Ads
There are several placements on the Amazon platform where your Sponsored Product Ads are served. Try doing a browser-based search on the word "Sponsored" and you'll see at least 16 ads any search results page. But that's not all, your sponsored ads can show up on the add-to-cart page, the right rail under the buy-box, on non-search result pages such as detail pages, as well as off-Amazon.
Up until 2018 we had very little insight into how placements worked. But starting January 2019, Amazon started providing a little more insight into placements. Essentially they started sharing performance metrics on 3 placements:
1. Top of Search
2. Product Pages
3. Rest of Search
To learn about the best ad placements, refer to the study we conducted
here.
How to optimize bids with PPC Ninja
Every week PPC Ninja analyzes your recent advertising performance and generates recommendations to alter your keyword bids. We do this by comparing your current ACoS with your target ACoS.
Look at the New Bid column and verify if the change we suggested is valid. Then, simply accept, reject or override it. Analyze the contextual data we provide, such as ACoS or sales to make your decision. We also provide Amazon’s recommended keyword bid range as a reference. If you have set up any additional modifiers for bids by placement, or any dynamic bidding strategies, those could further alter your base bid in real time.
Make changes to your bids row by row or in bulk. It’s that simple.
We’ll send you email reminders each week when new recommendations are posted.
How to change campaign details within PPC Ninja
PPC Ninja has a two-way sync with Amazon Seller Central Campaign manager. This means that any changes you make to your campaigns within PPC Ninja are automatically reflected on Seller Central.
There are a variety of changes you can make right from within the Campaigns view. You can change the Name of a campaign, the Maximum daily budget, the Bidding Strategy and any Bids by Placement modifiers.
The fact that you can do all of this in one place across all your campaigns is a huge time saver.
To create new campaigns simply use our +Campaign Wizard.
What to do with Zero Impression Keywords
Did you ever wonder why SO many of your keywords never get ANY impressions? Well there is a reason for that and is deeply rooted in the AI based algorithms that find buyer search matches for your keywords.
Amazon treats your keywords as a pool to pick from. Based on your budget, it serves impressions to a few at first, learns how they performed, then show more of the ones that did and less of the ones that didn't, till you are left with a whole bunch of keywords that never got any love. These may be perfectly good keywords and PPC Ninja wants to give them a second chance.
We highlight 60-day zero impression keywords, and make it super easy for you to move them to new campaigns that allows them a second chance. Access these from the Zero Impression Keywords Section on the left navigation bar.
